Exer-Genie Truck Pull Simulator Review

Last updated on January 11th, 2024 at 11:45 am

Background

Before we bought our house, we lived in an apartment complex that had a dead end street next to our building. One day coming back from a company party, I blew out my tire on a pot hole on a rainy night. I kept the tire and turned it into a dragging sled, and my life was forever altered. My Saturday mornings were often filled with dragging that tire, filled with some heavy sandbags and dumbbells, up and down the dead end street. Legs full of blood and lungs on fire, I knew I had found a missing ingredient to my training.

Fast forward a few years, we are in our house, garage gym is moving and grooving, and the tire is still part of my weekly routine, except now it is part of my Sunday Leg Days. Something about heavy squats and some gnarly hypertrophy work, followed by sled work is just magical. The eccentric-less movement of the sled (i.e. only half of the typical muscle contraction) is super easy on the joints, pushes a ton of blood, and feels restorative as it punishes your conditioning.

I personally like heavier slower sled work, than lighter and faster sled work. It fits better in the routine and accomplishes more of what I want it to. My last diet I regularly paired sled work with battle ropes, for a disgusting combo of blood moving and lung burning success.

I LOVE Sled Work

If you haven’t got the picture yet, I love sled work. Everything about it just screams garage gym athlete. DIY + outside work + brutally difficult + minimal space + super adaptive = Garage Gym Athlete gold mine.

With all of that said, there are a few downsides. First, as you get stronger, the tires start lasting less and less. I blew through my last one in under a year, both sides! Sure, tires are free from a local shop, but that still requires me to hit up the shop, drill a hole for the eyelet, etc. And, I’m getting stronger, so I only assume that the next tire will only last 6 months, then 3, and so on. Add to that, that a tire really isn’t meant to be loaded on its side, so the weights at a certain point just kind of stops working properly.

This led me to start researching other options. I borrowed a buddies small folding dragging sled for a test run and it was one of the biggest let-downs of my life. I loaded 6x45s on it and it felt like I was dragging a tissue box behind me. That was out after one run. I looked into the bigger sleds like the Dog Sled and Prowler, but everything I kept coming up with based on feedback from my followers, Reddit, and more, was that if I left the sled bare steel, it would drag and be much harder to pull.

But, it would also beat up the sled as well as my concrete, and be loud as hell. Add the skids to the sled, and no more damage or noise, but it now slides so well I’m back to needing 10x45s to feel anything. Neither of those options sounded good.

Other Options

I looked into the XPO trainer, which I was really close to purchasing. No need for weights, variable resistance so my daughter could use it between sets of me and my wife. It also came in a relatively compact package that could be stored on the wall, and then brought down and used by myself or my wife without issues. The downside was the intended use.

The way I use my sled is closer to how Joe Defranco programs what he calls HASD, opposed to a full on sprint. So if I was trying to move relatively slowly, I was concerned the XPO would be too easy. Thus, it wasn’t fit for purpose for me (If you are looking for a new sled and train sled work more like a sprint, look this bad boy up).

Torque

Final Decision

So after a bunch of research on options, I was back to square one. None of the offerings seemed to work. I even tried a DIY option with a furniture dolly, and that was way too easy. I was considering building a hybrid of the dog sled model, but cutting strips of tire tread to go on in place of the skids.

As I kept debating this in my head, I stumbled upon a discussion on Reddit r/HomeGym in our monthly targeted talks. We were discussing Cardio and Conditioning equipment in June, and someone asked about the Exer-Genie. Someone replied with an answer to get the Truck Pull Simulator, because you could simulate strongman training, and could adjust the resistance from World’s Strongest Man to newbie lifter.

Recap

So a quick review of what I wanted out of the Exer-Genie. Primary use would be to replace a typical dragging sled for slower, heavier, drags. It needed to be easy to use, quick to set-up and break down, be useable by myself and my wife, and of course work in my current garage gym environment. No damaging the side-walk or driveway, no making horrendous noise that would bother my neighbors, and needed storage abilities that wouldn’t negatively impact the rest of my gym. It should also last a long time without any kind of “replacement”. If it gave me the ability to use it all year long, even during the rain, that would be a huge improvement.

What follows are my experiences with the Exer-Genie.

Note – If this is the first review you’ve read of mine, I typically include information about the entire “customer experience” of the product, which will include social media presence, reviews, information, shipping, price, as well as the actual performance of the product.

What is the Exer-Genie?

Third is the Exer-Genie itself, which is a heavy duty, but light weight, plastic piece that the rope feeds through on one end, and has an anchor rope and carabiner on the other end. Inside the Exer-Genie is the inner workings that allow it to adjust the resistance on the fly as the rope feeds through it.

How it works in the simplest terms is, the rope feeds through the Exer-Genie on the bottom of one side and wraps around a metal piece inside the unit and comes out the bottom of the other side. The Exer-Genie has an adjustable resistance piece to take it from ounces to pounds of resistance placed on the rope. This of course makes it easier, or more difficult, to pull. I’m sure the engineering to make it work correctly is far beyond simple, even if the look and feel is fairly simplistic. Their website makes notes about space engineering plastics and other fancy terms.

The last piece is the carrying bag which puts it all together in a convenient place, and allows you to take it anywhere, or just store it easier.

Ordering, Shipping, Etc.

I mentioned in the background that finding information on the Exer-Genie, specifically the Truck Pull Simulator, wasn’t very easy. Their website is littered with information about isometric, isokinetic, and other trainer verbiage. Talking about how it helped shape the training programs of a bunch of football teams over the years followed by a number of videos and testimonials from people using it for resisted sprinting, speed and agility drills, and some odd looking pseudo-cable style exercises.

Even the page dedicated to the truck-pull simulator, has one demo video of a few strongmen, cut into more of an advertisement than an actual “this is how to use it” style video. Overall, the website just made me more confused. I am still not positive if the Truck Pull Simulator is the same thing as the speed and agility set-up, just with different harnesses, or a different product entirely.

YouTube HALP!

I turned to YouTube and found a couple of videos that gave me some good information, showing the set-up, adjustments, and overall use of the Truck Pull Simulator. Digging further was finding their Instagram, which has about 10 posts, which are mostly reused video clips from their site. Almost everything is geared towards their sprinting product, not the truck-pull simulator. Their team doesn’t seem to be very Instagram savvy, based on the fact that they look like they are trying to repost clips of various strongmen using the Truck Pull Simulator, but instead have commented the link on their own posts.

I ordered the 120 foot model, not having any idea what length would make sense. Right after purchasing it, I was already confused. I got a confirmation email, then a refund for a few dollars, then another confirmation email. Why I got this money back, I have no idea. I read something somewhere about shipping refunds from DHL, maybe it was that? The shipping cost was around $20, which considering how light and fairly small the package was, seems insanely expensive. I’ve shipped 25lb plates for less than that.

Regardless, the package showed up in good shape, much quicker than I expected, with a few different instruction materials. Those instructions, once again, were confusing. Some of them were for the other product, not the one I got. And you almost had to reference all three pages to get a full picture of what you needed from the instructions. Honestly, more confusing with the instructions than if I had just winged it, which is basically what I did.

Customer Service?

The overall customer experience of finding, researching, ordering, and unboxing, was subpar. I can see why I have never heard of this before, and when asking others, almost no one outside of the strongmen community has any idea what it is (and even then, it is few and far between). Now, if I was buying this for the sake of the speed and agility training stuff, we’d be in business.

That is clearly their primary target. But for the Truck-Pull Simulator, it feels like an afterthought. Just overall they are lacking in the clarity of the Truck Pull Simulator in terms of what it does, how to use it, why to use it, where to use it, etc. A lot of potential improvements from better information, demo videos, better social media, and more in this category.

How does the Exer-Genie work?

Rope

The rope ended up getting dragged through the bark in my front yard, over some flowers and bushes, across my neighbor’s lawn, and then finally onto my driveway. Now, if I had done the mental math, I would have known that the sidewalk in front of my house is about 60 feet long. So 120 when stretched out would be WAY too long. I also learned that the carabiners on each end of the rope keep the rope on the ground as it drags. The issue here is that I was using it outside on concrete, and concrete and dragging rope don’t tend to mix well.

After about 15 minutes of testing my rope already looked like it wasn’t going to live through more than a few workouts. Add to this that the rope essentially grabs any debris, sticks, etc. as it drags, and you get a really nice combo of the unit catching sporadically, damaging the rope, and more. The last piece, which they mention in the instructions, is that the Exer-Genie body can get VERY hot during use. Rope friction is no laughing matter, and they were not kidding. After the 15 minutes of use, touching the unit itself without at least a towel or glove in between would seriously burn you.

All that said, once I got the resistance right and did a little manual guiding of the rope, it did what I wanted it to do. It gave me that eccentric-less training feeling of a sled, without a sled. No noise, no damage to the concrete, no loading plates.

Round 2

After a few days of pondering how Round 2 could be improved, I cut my 120 foot rope into 2 x 60 foot ropes. The benefits here are that 60 feet is WAY more manageable, and also way more consistent with the distance I was doing before with the tire sled. Also, my garage is about 22×22, and my driveway is about 27×27.

So 60 feet gets me from one end of the garage, down the driveway, and almost to the end of the rope. I also now had a back-up rope incase the first one died on me. I then wrapped the ends of the rope, near the carabiners, in a round of duct tape, followed by electricians tape. This gave the rope a little buffer between the concrete, thus extending its life when it came to dragging.

Round 2 had me attaching the Exer-Genie to my dumbbell rack in the back of the gym, and running the rope out the front of the garage and down the driveway. Round 2 was WAY better than round 1. 60 feet meant less snags, meant no more bark and front lawns, and overall just way more manageable.

Better, But Not Good

Because the Exer-Genie was inside, instead of outside, it also stayed dramatically cooler even at the end of the workout, which meant easier adjustments as well as a quicker time to put everything away. What I learned in Round 2 was that any tension or catch on the rope, including the carabiner catching on a crack in the driveway, catching behind a tire, stepping on the rope, or my daughter grabbing the rope thinking it is a toy, results in the Exer-Genie essentially freezing in place.

One downside of using my dumbbell rack, is the multiple transitions of the ground. I go from stall mats, to slick garage floor, to grippy driveway. The issue here was really around finding the right tension for the slick garage, that wasn’t too easy for the driveway. Plus, the rope drags and skips on the transitions between the driveway to the garage, and the garage to the gym flooring.

What Happened

Ultimately, I used the Exer-Genie consistently for a few months, and then dropped it. It hung up on my wall for the majority of 6 months due to me not being able to get it to function the way I wanted. I ended up bringing it back out a few months ago for my wife’s programming and went back to work on a Round 3 for how to use it effectively.

What we ended up doing was taking my box squat box out to the front sidewalk, wrapping it around that, and having me sit on the box. I can then adjust the tension between sets, help her set up the carabiner, and make sure we get no snags or twists or anything in the line. This is the VERY best result. No more transitions in pavement, no more hiccups or catches, etc. It runs smooth, does exactly what we want, and is fairly easy to set-up and break down. The huge downside is the need for a second person.

For me personally that is really difficult as I almost exclusively train by myself, and my leg days are often during the middle of the week when my wife is at work. This means that while I have a solution for my wife to use it, I’m still stuck on my own end. Which is where my experiments ended.

Final Take Aways for the Exer-Genie

Overall, the unit is compact, easy to store, easy to set-up, and capable of supporting athletes at every stage of strength. It makes zero noise, doesn’t damage any surfaces, and allows you to mimic sled work with no sled. The fact that you can use it for various athletes back to back with no need for tons of weight changes is amazing. I could literally run my daughter, my wife, me, and Thor Bjornson on the same piece of equipment with only a few clicks of adjustment.

The big downsides are the need for a clean and clear space, AND an anchor point. For the average garage gym athlete, we tend to have one or the other. Anchor points are in the gym with the heavy machinery, and clean and clear spaces are out front. So, you have to find a tree, a truck, or some hybrid solution like I have, to make this work. A typical commercial gym setting with rolled rubber flooring throughout, or a nice clean concrete path, on a basketball court, anything smooth, flat, and straight.

When you get the path right, you’ve got most of the issues handled. The last piece is really just getting the ropes straight, which does become a problem with multiple back and forth trips or multiple tension adjustments back to back. Again, this is remedied by a training partner holding it straight, but for us training solo in a garage gym, that doesn’t really cut it.

Wrap Your Tool

If you own one of these, or plan to, I highly recommend getting some type of item to wrap your chord around. I use an old Tow Rope spool, and this cuts down the set-up time, the storage time, and eliminates a lot of issues with the rope getting caught in general.

The heat of the unit I want to reiterate. If you had multiple athletes with different strength levels doing multiple sets with this, you would seriously need a glove to adjust the tension between athletes. Not unlike unloading a sled, reloading it, over and over. This is less than ideal. If it is one athlete hitting a handful of sets back to back with minimal adjustments, you are likely good.

I can 100% see where this fits into a strongman arsenal for truck pull work, or if you have the right space for sled style work. For me, it is still missing the mark ever so slightly enough that I just don’t personally use it. So I’m still hunting for the ultimate sled solution for my garage gym.

If you had a long driveway and a truck, you could easily hook it up to the back and go for it. If you have a tree leading into an open field, or concrete path, or something, literally anything where you have a heavy anchor followed by a straight, smooth, clear path, this is going to likely nail it for you. But if you have a rock driveway, or dirt path, or cracks and crevices, or whatever. This thing has some HUGE flaws.

The End

So… in the end I sold the Exer Genie as it just BARELY missed the mark, but that barely piece was a HUGE deal breaker. So close, yet so far away…

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